We perceive the world around us through our five senses: hearing, seeing, feeling, smelling and tasting. Whatever the world is really like, we use our senses to explore and map it. The world is an infinity of possible sense impressions and we are able to perceive only a very small part of it. The small part we do perceive is further filtered by our unique experiences, culture, language, beliefs, values, interests and assumptions. Each of us lives in our unique reality built from our sense impressions and individual experiences of life, and we act on the basis of what we perceive our model of the world.
In consequence, our models are NOT the reality, but representations of reality. There are three mechanisms common to all model-building activities: generalization, deletion and distortion. NLP categorizes the filtration process into these three classes.
- Generalization Process by which one specific experience comes to represent a whole class of experiences
- Deletion Missing out a portion of an experience.
- Distortion Changing experience, making it different in some way.
In NLP we call these the ‘universal human modelling processes’. These three processes operate at every stage in the construction and use of our models of the world. They underlie our abilities to concentrate, to plan and learn, and to dream. They become evident to the trained observer through a person’s speech and behaviour, and learning to detect and utilize the universal processes is a central theme of NLP.
